Concise English-Chinese Chinese-English Dictionary

Rating:
Summary: Concise and Manageable
Review: As concise dictionaries go this offering from Oxford is my cup of tea. I have two huge dictionaries: C-E and E-C but when I want to look up a word I always turn to this one first. It does not pretend to have everything, but nine times out of ten it has what I am looking for.

The first half of the dictionary is English to Chinese with the second half reversing that. The E-C section has the English word followed by the Chinese equivalent (if there is such a thing :) in characters, followed by the pinyin. For common words it also includes variations and short examples. This seems to be somewhat inconsistently done in terms of the amount of English included and/or pinyin. It assumes that the reader has at least a minimal grasp of Chinese. If they do not what are the expecting from a dictionary? Language cannot be equated word for word. You must study it in its cultural context.

The second half of the dictionary is arranged alphabetically by pinyin, tone and radical. In other words if you knew rice/meal was "fan" you would look up "fan" and then find the fourth tone section and then the character for rice. If you do not know the tone (always a challenge) or the character (a bigger challenge) it gets a little harder. Chinese is not a language designed for dictionaries. As with most Chinese dictionaries it is almost impossible for a non-native speaker to look up a character to find its meaning. It is an involved process of figuring out which stroke was first and how many there are and whether or not the character is single or combined with others. The radical index is well laid out and I have seen a Chinese locate a character in seven seconds with little problem. Anyone using this dictionary should already know that however, so I do not count it against the dictionary.

For the benefit of those who might buy this dictionary let me say what it is not. It is not an exhaustive dictionary. It is not designed as a textbook for learning new words. It is not a phrasebook for tourists. It also assumes that you know enough Chinese to tell the difference between shi (ten) and shi (rock). If you fit this description and are looking for a concise dictionary for everyday use I would not hesitate to recommend this one.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent, easy to use reference for students of Chinese
Review: I am a teacher of Mandarin Chinese and this is the dictionary I recommend to all my students. The book uses pinyin romanization which is standard in most Chinese language classes in the US today. When a character is written in its simplified form, the traditional form is also shown - a feature hard to find in many Chinese dictionaries. Definitions are followed by the word used in a simple phrase or sentence. The English-Chinese, Chinese-English format makes it convenient for students to cross-reference words. A radical index in the center of the dictionary enables you to look up a word if you only know what a character looks like but you don't know how to pronounce it. (However you do need to know how to identify all the radicals first). The book is relatively small and easy to carry (unless you are one of those unfortunate students who have to lug a twenty-pound backpack to school each day). Best of all for those with fading eyesight like myself, the print is large enough so that you don't need to dig out your magnifying glass each time you need to look up a word.

Rating:
Summary: Lone student
Review: I am currently an English teacher in China attempting to study Chinese. I have found this dictionary to be fantastic largely due to the fact that there is lots of pinyin, all of the hanying dictionaries that I can buy here have very little pinyin and so have made me realise how important it is.

The Chinese-English half of the dictionary has the characters arranged in alphabetical order according to the pinyin, then each character has a list of words (two characters or more) with the pinyin for all of the characters in the word.

The only reason that I wouldnt give this dictionary five stars is that the usage examples in the definitions dont have pinyin with them so if you dont know one character/word you have to go back to the stroke counting section to look it up to get the whole meaning, although having the pinyin would make the dictionary excessively bulky, so that is a trade off. I find the dictionary a good size so I can take it along when backpacking to continue studying but also big enough that it covers all the words that I have come across in my studies so far (up to PCR4).

Enjoy your study.

Rating:
Summary: Good Beginning to Intermediate Dictionary
Review: I own the three major Chinese English dictionaries. The Matthews dictionary has long since been retired, in favor of the Far Eastern Chinese-English Dictionary (FE). The Concise dictionary also has been superceded, except for the English-Chinese section, and as a lookup for simplified characters and a second source for words in case they're not in FE.

To my amazement, I discovered that Concise has a glaring error repeated throughout: the character for hair (fa3) is said to have the fourth tone. Also, I have found frequent instances where a character is listed in the index, but not in the body of the book. Otherwise, I've found it fairly reliable. Nevertheless, it is too limited to be of much use for literary documents.

For an intermediate to advanced user, FE is very easy to use. While it at first seemed harder to use, mainly because the characters are listed in radical/stroke order in the main body of the dictionary, the pinyin index makes looking up characters faster, surprisingly, than with Concise, which lists them alphabetically by pinyin. Still, I miss the grouping of characters by pronunciation, which often enticed me to refresh my memory of other related characters.

Rating:
Summary: Improvement over earlier Oxfords, but still not the best
Review: I started out with the much smaller predecessor of this dictionary--Oxford Concise (ISBN 0195840488). This Oxford (ISBN 0195911512) is a marked improvement due to its larger size. But today I use the ABC Chinese Dictionary (ISBN 082482766X), which allows you to look up by the alphabetized listing of the complete Chinese word in pinyin, not the two-step head character-second character system used on Oxford Concise, and only use Oxford when I can't find what I want in ABC or can't read a character. Still, this is a solid choice for the beginner.

Rating:
Summary: Save your money
Review: I took this dictionary to China to study Chinese intensively at what could be best described at a "high-beginner" level, and quickly found it was inadequate to the task. So many common words are omitted entirely that I was soon required to purchase an additional dictionary in China. My Concise dictionary? I left it behind to serve as a doorstop in Beijing.

Rating:
Summary: Chinese is difficult enough - Why make it harder?
Review: I was disappointed by this dictionary, because it doesn't really seem well geared to people wishing to learn Chinese, but more to Chinese native speakers wishing to learn English. The reason I point this out is that, as the reviewer before me points out, the examples are in Chinese characters with no pinyin in the Chinese section. The methodology of the dictionary in that it gives example sentences and not just one word for another is sound, however, unless you already read Chinese well, you will be at a loss when it comes to using those all-important example phrases. Incidentally, this seems to be a regular habit of Chinese publishing houses which produce manuals and courses for learns of the language, as I have pointed out in my review of "New Slang Of China" and as I have observed in a set of idiom books produced from another publishing house in the east, many teaching aids do not take into account the fact that beginner and even intermediate students of Chinese still need pinyin or some other form of transliteration as a crutch, otherwise the examples are well nigh worthless! I am surprised to see this trend also in teh Oxford dictionary, unless it is intended primarily for Chinese students and not students of Chinese, especially as the author is a westerner! You would think he would know what learners really need, no wouldn't you? There's no excuse! Fortunately, Oxford has had the good sense to release a new dictionary, "The Oxford Starter Chinese Dictionary" which, as the name suggests, in geared towards learners of Chinese. You would do well to have that book as well as this one, or, given the choice, instead of it. Us ethe other one and keep this one for someof the more complicated words you might need to look up.

Rating:
Summary: Pretty good dictionary
Review: I've purchased a couple of chinese language books recently and I would say this is the one I use the most. I've found almost every word I've looked for, on either the english or chinese side. It is easy to find words, and the radical index is easy to use and is much more complete than other books I've used.

Only two minor complaints about this book make it 4 instead of 5 stars. First, the print is fairly small and light, need to focus in a bright area to easily use it. Second, on the english side of the dictionary sometimes the pinyin is first, sometimes the chinese characters are first. I would make it easier to use if they had been consistant on this, especially the longer entries.

But I do like this book and will continue to use it a lot.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent dictionary
Review: If I can have only one affordable English/Chinese dictionary, this would be it. (It is far more better than the popular Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary (ISBN 0966075005) although that particular dictionary is fairly good.)This dictionary is actually two way dictionaries: one half is English/Chinese and the other half is Chinese/English. Containing some 26,000 words and phrases, it is certainly not a dictionary for the scholar, but a student of Chinese will find it very useful. Although the book emphasizes simplified characters, traditional characters are provided and a student using the traditional characters would be fine with this dictionary.

The real drawback to this dictionary, which is why I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 is that, as other reviewers have mentioned, it does NOT provide the Pinyin for its example phrases/sentences; thus if the reader does not know a certain character s/he will have to find it by using the radically index or go the English/Chinese portion and find the word there (English traditions of the example phrases/sentences are provided). Also try the Xinhua Zidian (ISBN 7801031989), which is another excellent Chinese/English dictionary.

Rating:
Summary: Not the best but not that bad
Review: Personally I did not like this dictionary because it relies too much on pinyin and not enough on the actual characters. But I did like the fact that it did have a radical reference, since this is a really valuable resource. But the radical index needed to be bigger. As mentioned in other reviews there are mistakes and some of them are major mistakes. It could have been a lot better and if you are a serious chinese student you should probably ask a chinese professor to recommend a good dictionary, it will probably be more expensive than this one. On a side note, the characters in this book are the standard characters of the PRRC and it uses the Mandarin dialect, that means that it uses simplified characters. Those are the standard if you don't want the simplified characters it is probably a better idea to get a Tiwanese dictionary or a Cantonese dictionary, and not complain about this dictionary.